


Nightmares

by luoup (ravenic)



Series: It's All Friends Here, All Love [Platonic Week #3] [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Nightmares, Platonic VLD Week, nightmare coping techniques
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-29
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2019-01-26 09:27:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12554388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenic/pseuds/luoup
Summary: Day 1 Prompt 2: NightmaresNightmare coping techniques





	Nightmares

They had been Voltron for what felt at once such a long time and such a very short one.  So much had happened.  The Humans’ entire worldview had been overturned.  This was big. 

This was a war.  They were really still just children, all of them, but it didn’t matter.  None of them could be children anymore.  They were soldiers now, and soldiers had dreams. 

Every one of them had nightmares regularly, now.  Shiro had more nightmares than sleep, which unfortunately could only be expected after what he had endured.  Keith dreamed regularly about the year of “pilot error” back on Earth, and of Shiro going missing in space.  Mixed in were dreams where he failed to protect the other Paladins, leaving them wounded or dead at his fault.  When Pidge did actually sleep between all her work on the castleship and the Lions and trying to find her family, she saw Haxus, and Rover, and Sendak.  She saw her brother and father, distressed mind filling in the gaps of what she didn’t know about their whereabouts, their health, their survival.  Lance dreamed of Earth, of home, but it was an Earth that had been overtaken by the Galra like so many other planets.  Hunk’s nightmares were filled with the loss of the other Paladins, of those he loved.  He was the Yellow Paladin, a guardian, and the deaths of any of the others was unacceptable. 

They all had their ways of handling things, not that they were necessarily good strategies.  Shiro and Pidge tended to just avoid sleeping as much as possible, him wandering around or working out or reading, her concentrating on her projects in an attempt to distract herself.  Keith spent an honestly unhealthy amount of time in the training deck.  Sometimes Lance would go to the observatory deck and stargaze when he couldn’t sleep, but sometimes the vast expanse of stars and darkness with no Earth in sight only made things worse.  Hunk cooked.  Anything, everything, at all hours of the day and night.  He needed _something_ that worked, something that was familiar (despite the strange ingredients, the core of cooking would always be familiar to him). 

The Alteans had nightmares too.  For them, the loss of Altea, of everything and everyone they knew and loved, was painfully recent.  They spent time together when they could, the last two people in the universe who truly understood what it felt like. 

Everyone in the Castle of Lions had nightmares, but hardly anyone sought out help or company.  Each felt that they would be imposing, intruding, and so most of the time although they all had dreams and woke afraid or upset, they each kept alone. 

But sometimes they got up the courage to find the others, and that could make all the difference. 

* * *

Keith sat up in the darkness, panting.  The tatters of the dream fell away, and he forced himself to breathe slowly.  It was just a dream.  He was in the Castle of Lions.  Everyone was safe.  Shiro was with them.  Nobody had died.  He hadn’t failed them.  It was just a dream. 

Well.  He definitely wasn’t going back to sleep now.  Keith threw off the blankets and shoved his feet into his boots, tugging his jacket on and pressing the button to open his bedroom’s door.  Might as well go train or something, since there was clearly no more sleep to be had for him tonight. 

But to get to the training deck he first had to go by the kitchen, and in passing it Keith noticed that he wasn’t the only one having trouble sleeping.  Correction: apparently, nobody was sleeping.  The kitchen held every living being of the castleship, scattered around the room and, despite the hour of the night, not asleep. 

Hunk was cooking.  Or maybe baking?  Keith wasn’t great at kitchen things.  The Yellow Paladin had a handful of bowls scattered across the counter and a pot on the stove, and it looked like there was something in the oven.  Lance was helping, since he was the only one who actually knew how to do kitchen-assisting things right without driving Hunk nuts.  Pidge was sitting on a bit of unoccupied counterspace, headphones on, working on… something.  She had her laptop, it could have been any of a hundred projects.  With Pidge, who knew. 

Allura and Coran sat together nearby, talking quietly.  Allura looked… shaken.  Different, more fragile than she ever looked during the day.  Coran didn’t look great either, moustache less perky than usual, but Keith himself felt kind of like he had left half his body in his bedroom or possibly in outer space, so he didn’t really have room to talk. 

Shiro was there, too.  He had probably started out sitting at the counter near Pidge, watching Hunk work and talking with Lance.  But now he was asleep, lying half on the table and snoring lightly.  He looked tired (an understatement, Shiro always looked exhausted), but relaxed.  Peaceful. 

“Hey, Keith,” Hunk greeted, smiling at his friend.  “Couldn’t sleep?”

Keith shook his head.  “Would have slept.  Brain had other ideas.  Didn’t like ’em.”

“Nightmares,” Lance nodded understandingly, handing Hunk a little jar of something labeled in Hunk’s tiny neat blocky handwriting.  “Super sucky.”

“Guess it’s been a bad night for them,” Hunk said.  He gestured vaguely at the rest of the fully-occupied kitchen. 

Apparently, Keith wasn’t alone – bad dreams had been a common occurrence tonight.  “Oh,” he said quietly.  It was the nature of nightmares to make one feel alone, no matter how many other people were around or how much they cared.  But Keith wasn’t alone, and they did care.  It was hard to process sometimes. 

Hunk waved a spatula towards an open seat at the counter.  “Wanna help taste-test?  I’m trying to make space brownies.”

“Like regular brownies, but in space,” Lance added. 

“The first few batches were kind of… flaky, but I think I’ve got the ratios down this time,” Hunk said, pointing at the oven.  “You can try them out and tell me what you think – I’m pretty sure Lance and I are starting to lose our brownie-tasting abilities.  It’s been a few batches.”

“Shiro was helping, but he fell asleep after the first two rounds, and Pidge doesn’t want brownie in her laptop,” Lance explained. 

Something somewhere went _ding_ and Hunk opened the oven to take out the space brownies.  “Don’t be turned off by the color,” he said, tugging out a pan of navy-colored something.  “It’s much better than the first batch, because brownies the color of cement is a major turn-off.  Trust me, this is a big improvement.”

Keith was having a hard time with words, but he went to the spot Hunk had pointed to and sat down.  Pidge glanced up for a second, nodding briefly before dropping her gaze back to the glowing screen.  Shiro snored on, oblivious to his brother’s arrival to the weird midnight kitchen party.  Keith took the bluish brownie when it was offered to him and accepted a cup of that strange but wonderful magenta juice that Hunk had picked up on the last grocery run. 

The space brownies were really good.  Keith had rarely had the opportunity to eat brownies back on Earth, so there wasn’t much to compare them to.  Maybe that was a good thing – no preexisting notions.  In any case, they were definitely not bad. 

It didn’t escape Keith that this was not a normal hang-out time.  Allura still seemed on the verge of tears.  Coran looked his age, tired in a way that the energetic alien hardly ever was.  Shiro was so tired that the second he’d gotten into the company of people he trusted he had practically passed out, body and mind desperate for the rest that the nightmares corrupted and the strain of being the Mature Adult Leader drove away.  Hunk was too fidgety, antsing around the kitchen like he physically could not remain still, and Lance was talking a lot but his tone was off; it kept wobbling and he seemed to lose his train of thought more than usual.  Pidge’s typing was almost vicious, and she wouldn’t look up from her computer, headphones firmly in place. 

This was just how it was going to be, sometimes.  They were fighting a war, and a soldier’s life wasn’t known for its peaceful sleep.  Nightmares were always going to happen, they were a part of life now. 

But despite the lingering fears and anxieties, the aftereffects of battle, the strain of working too much and sleeping too little, there was somehow still peace to be found.  Shiro was sleeping, watched over by people who cared about him.  Hunk’s brownies were finally turning out well, and his jitters eased as the food cooked.  Lance was not alone with his thoughts, able to surround himself with people like he used to at home.  Pidge’s typing was slowing, relaxing from frenetic stabs at the keyboard to a lazier tapping, and she finally tugged the headphones off and looked up, demanding to try the brownies at last.  Allura and Coran would never get back what they had lost, but they had each other, and new friends to remind them that the universe still existed.  Life went on, even in the hardest of circumstances. 

Keith accepted another brownie, leaning against Shiro’s side as his brother’s snores rumbled on, and felt himself relax for the first time since waking up. 

Nightmares were going to happen.  That was a simple fact, no matter how unfortunate it may be.  But at least nobody had to endure them alone. 


End file.
